Stefano Bottoni's history of the short-lived Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-inspired experiment that circumscribed one-third of Romania's Hungarian population inside a territorial administrative unit in the heart of pre-Ceaușescu communist Romania, joins a growing and important body of scholarship on east central Europe analyzing the entangled histories of peoples, places, and periods in a particular region. Introduced in Romania's 1952 Constitution, the autonomous region was grafted onto the historical homeland to the Szekler Hungarians in the foothills of the eastern Carpathians, in the historical mesoregion of Transylvania. The HAR included half-a-million Hungarians, nearly one-hundred-fifty thousand Romanians, and trace numbers of Roma, Germans, and Jews within 13,500 square kilometers (73). As Bottoni elucidates in the first three chapters, the attempt to manage the “ethnic question” based on Stalinist–Leninist principles in postwar Romania helped legitimize the upstart Romanian communists in Stalin's eyes, empowering them to restructure and reform in radically new ways the country's political and administrative system.

Modeled on the Soviet oblast and the raionization of discrete national minorities, the HAR was justified to the Romanian populace as a vehicle for advancing ethnic brotherhood and unity by integrating the Hungarian minority into the communist state. By contrast, the HAR promised the Hungarians of eastern Transylvania an unprecedented vehicle for economic improvement, cultural development, and social equalization. For most Romanians, however, the specter of Hungarian “autonomy,” which Romanian communists never explicitly defined or codified, stoked long-held fears of territorial revision, namely the return of Transylvania (in part or whole) to Hungary. Rather than placating tensions between the nationalities in Romania, these policy prescriptions resulted in a false sense of expectation for Hungarians, resentment from the ethnic Romanians, and administrative and political confusion for both. Sensing the empathy felt across Transylvania for the causes of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Romanian government began the gradual rescission of Hungarian regional autonomy. By 1960 the HAR was practically dismantled, though it persisted nominally and in various iterations until 1968.

Behind the book's rather uninspired cover is a theoretically rich but succinct introduction, six well-paced chronological chapters, and a short conclusion. The book is stocked with a wide variety of maps, charts, and photos, though curiously a list of illustrations was not included in the front matter. Lambert's is a very fine translation in which Bottoni's narrative voice is clearly expressed and easily understood. The chapters move through a series of historical events and phenomena, including the genesis of the Hungarian Autonomous Region in Romania in 1952, the uneasy rollout of the imposed venture, and the possibilities and pitfalls that the autonomous region generated inside Romania for communists and non-communists alike; the subsequent patterns of, and responses to, state violence and social control in the region throughout the 1950s; and, finally, the impact of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the subsequent reprisals on Romania's Hungarian communist elites and other non-Romanian minorities. Bottoni concludes by taking to task the predominant historical interpretations of the HAR as merely a “showcase” that offered a meaningless concession to the Hungarian minority, or else as a postwar “ghetto” that isolated and regulated a potentially hostile national minority. Instead, the author persuasively argues that the autonomous region operated as a kind of “cultural greenhouse” that provided the region's Hungarian population “with a new living environment in which Hungarian folk culture and the egalitarian social outlook served as the sustaining elements rather than communist ideological prescripts,” even if the region never became the enduring social project its supporters hoped it could be (350). The real virtue of the author's work is in the assemblage and skillful deployment of Hungarian- and Romanian-language archival sources, oral histories, and an array of secondary sources within a compelling narrative and taut analytical framework. In this and other respects, the book is a worthy successor to Holly Case's Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II (2009).

At first glance, Bottoni's history of the HAR is a deceptively simple microhistory of Stalin's successful manipulation of ethnic rivalries and territorial precarity for the exertion of Soviet influence in the eastern bloc. But the book offers much lengthier, synoptic views of the overlapping and intersecting lived experiences of Romanians and Hungarians, framed within the broader sweep of European and Transylvanian history. It is now the definitive work, in any language, on this rather specialized topic, and stands out as a seminal case study in the building and dismantling of a Stalinist ecosystem in Europe's eastern periphery.